[imagesource: NASA/JPL]
No, you’re not looking at the Golden Snitch from the Harry Potter movies.
Rather, it’s an artist’s rendition of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that is currently surveying Mars, which holds the key to the most high-def footage of the Red Planet.
We’re talking about the High-Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which according to The University of Arizona is “the most powerful camera ever sent to another planet”.
The incredible HiRISE camera captured the coolest shot of a Mars crater earlier this year, which YouTuber Seán Doran then turned into a nifty little video.
But first, according to the caption on the video, it had to be “denoised, blended, graded & rescaled” before the final result:
HuffPost reported that the video gives “armchair astronauts one of the clearest looks yet deep inside a crater on Mars”.
Besides massive ditches, the HiRISE has also captured other fascinating phenomena on Mars.
Like this dust devil, captured from 297 kilometres above the ground according to SciTechDaily:
Apparently, the length of this whirlwind’s shadow indicates that it stretched more than 800 metres in height.
That is about the size of the United Arab Emirate’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest building on Earth, by the way.
[sources:huffpost&scitechdaily]
